Sophos Antivirus Falsely Flags Update Utilities as Malware

Security software firm Sophos is apologizing after a recent update to its antivirus software resulted in the software incorrectly categorizing its update utility as harmful in Windows machines.

Issues started to arise on Thursday for enterprise networks running Sophos according to The Register. The UK-based IT publication received many reader e-mails from those who began to get false positives for malware in their systems.

"About 9.20 this evening, every PC on my network (about 100 of them) started sending me an email every 10 minutes saying that a virus had been detected in one of the DLL files of Sophos Endpoint Security & Control," wrote reader Iain H in an e-mail.

While Sophos did not provide details on why the recent update was causing problems, it did confirm that its Live Protection system flagging any binaries with update capabilities as malware was at fault.

"We would like to apologize for all of the disruption caused to our many customers and partners worldwide," wrote Sophos in a security advisory. "We recognize the issue is very serious, and are doing everything we can to resolve it. We are launching a full investigation to analyze how this happened, to ensure that it never happens again, and will provide further information on the analysis in due course."

The company has already released an update that it said resolves the issue. Users should update their Sophos software to the latest version as soon as possible.